Friday, 21 May 2010
SHAMELESS COMMERCE DIVISION OF THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE
Since this is an off day for the Memoir, I thought I would take the opportunity to do some advertising. Six years ago, Susie and I bought a little one room ground floor studio apartment on the Left Bank in the old part of Paris, half a block from the Seine, catty-corner from Notre Dame. We rent it out when we are not there, regularly advertising in the back pages of the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. The ad reads " Paris - Blue State Special." We will be there in June, and it is rented for much of the summer, but starting at the beginning of September, it is open. If anyone is interested,send me an email. Where else in Paris can you find the complete German language edition of the collected works of Marx and Engels, not to speak of a shelf of books on Kant and a copy of every version of every book I have ever published?
Thursday, 20 May 2010
MEMOIR VOLUME TWO CHAPTER FOUR THIRD INSTALLMENT
There were moments, however. When Toby was four, we decided to visit the Moores so that Barry could meet his godson. We all piled into the big green Chevy station wagon and drove in to Cambridge. When we arrived, we discovered that Marcuse was there. Herbert's wife, Inge, had passed away shortly before, and Herbert had come East to spend time with an old friend. Barry was delighted to meet little Toby. The Moores had no children of their own. But he had not the foggiest idea how to play with a four year old. The best he could come up with was to talk German to Toby. Marcuse, on the other hand, was an absolute natural with kids. With his shock of white hair, rosy cheeks, and piercing eyes, Herbert looked like one of those big blow-up rubber figures that pop back up each time you tip them over. He got down on the floor with Toby, picked up a desk globe that Moore had on a table, and started spinning it, telling Toby wild stories about all the places in the world. Toby was enchanted. Eventually, it came time for us to leave, and the Moores and Marcuse accompanied us out to the curb. As we were loading the kids into the back seat for the drive home, Toby suddenly looked up at Marcuse, waved his hand, and said "Bye Herbie." I told that story to Tobias' UPenn law colleagues when I visited them to present a paper. I think it gained him some considerable hit points in the competitive world of academic law.
One day when we were having lunch, Herbert told me a lovely story about himself and his son, Peter, that has stayed in my memory because it so perfectly captures the way I feel about Patrick and Tobias [I must school myself not to write "Toby" when I am referring to his adult years.] After Marcuse left Brandeis, he taught for a time at UC Dan Diego. It is there that he taught Angela Davis. His son, Peter, was working in the area as a city planner. One day, Marcuse said, he was walking on the beach when a young man approached him, hesitantly and obviously nervous about disturbing him. Finally, the young man got his courage up and said, "Excuse me, but aren't you Peter Marcuse's father?" Herbert roared with laughter when he told the story, obviously delighted to take a back seat to his son. I am always tickled to be acknowledged as Patrick or Tobias' father.
Although both Patrick and Toby were preternaturally smart, they were, after all, little boys. Very early on, they acquired a taste for comic books, which accumulated at such a rate that we finally bought two big plastic laundry baskets for their rooms, to maintain some semblance of order. Both boys had the uncanny ability to plunge a hand into a basket filled with comics in order to pluck out just the one they wanted to read. After a bit, I grew curious about what was in them. Comics in my day had been rather benign affairs -- Richie Rich and Looney Tunes -- but these seemed to be a good deal more violent than that. So I sat down one day and read a couple of dozen chosen at random from the two baskets. I made two discoveries that reassured me. First of all, the vocabulary in the comics was actually rather sophisticated. You could learn more from reading them than you could from the readers the boys were given in school. The second discovery was even more surprising. The underlying moral sensibility of the comics was unswervingly liberal. The villains, to a man or woman, were basically good people who had become angry and bitter because of some terrible experience, such as falling into a vat of hot oil or being dropped from an airplane without a parachute. They weren't evil, they were just misunderstood. [Rather like Anakin Skywalker.] "Well", I thought, "that's all right then," and left the boys to their comic books. Now that both Patrick and Tobias are astonishingly successful men, people sometimes ask me what I did when they were little to produce this result. I just say, "I let them read comic books and watch television, and I spent a lot of time talking to them."
As I have observed, my years at Columbia were anomalous in one respect: while there, I had no involvement with other departments or programs. I had enjoyed my brief time as Head Tutor of Social Studies at Harvard, as well as my engagement with the last remnants of the Hutchins curriculum at Chicago, and I wanted to continue that sort of broadened intellectual activity. During my job interviews with Dean Seymour Shapiro, I had asked whether there would be an opportunity for me to create an undergraduate interdisciplinary program at UMass. "Sure," he said, "if you want to." Once I was settled into my new department, I cast about for some way to proceed. What I had in mind was a left-wing version of Social Studies. That may sound odd to any Harvard types reading this, because in the hermetic world of Harvard Square, Social Studies is considered a way-out radical program. I have no doubt that it attracts to itself the most progressive students at Harvard, but the program itself lies squarely in what I think of as the intellectual mainstream. Smith, Marx, Tyler, Weber, and Freud are the bread and butter of social theory. I had in mind something a bit edgier.
Vere Chappell suggested I talk to Jim Shaw , a young man who headed up The College of Arts and Sciences Information and Advising Center, or CASIAC. Jim warned me that folks at UMass did not like "empire builders," and he thought that I might do better to fly under the radar at first by creating my new program within something he called BDIC. [I was beginning to discover the State University penchant for acronyms]. This stood for "Bachelor's Degree in Individual Concentration," and was actually a rather intelligent way for students to create their own fields of concentration if none of the existing departmental majors got their scholarly juices flowing. All a student had to do to be a BDIC major was to find a faculty member willing to serve as advisor, work up a plan of courses drawn from a variety of departmental offerings, and run it past a reasonably complaisant committee. Shaw pointed out that there was nothing to stop me from crafting an interdisciplinary major and then inviting a group of students to sign on. Technically, each of them would be doing an individually designed major. It would simply be a coincidence that all the individual plans were the same.
My first move was to call a meeting of forty or more people from all five colleges whose interests would, I thought, incline them to join with me in this venture. I went out of my way to invite several of the Pioneer Valley's best known right-wing intellectuals. I was still under the influence of the Ivy League mindset, and simply assumed that it would be people from the four private colleges in the area who would be my best resource. Almost immediately, I learned some hard lessons that shaped the program from then on. UMass was growing so rapidly that people's teaching duties were rather fluid. A goodly number of the UMass people at the meeting assured me that they could get sprung loose from their departmental teaching obligations to participate in a new program. But the representatives of Amherst, Smith, and Mt. Holyoke were unanimous in expressing grave doubts that they could contribute as little as one course every two or three years. In the end, I gave up on the idea of a Five College program, and laid plans for an exclusively UMass structure.
My idea was simple enough. Students would cobble together courses from four or five different departments -- History, Economics, Philosophy, Political Science, principally -- and then take a two semester senior seminar designed just for them and taught by a brace of professors drawn from two different departments. I would handle all the administrative work, such as it was, so the only cost would be some freed up time of two professors each semester. The UMass Sociology Department was such a disaster that I had no expectation of being able to draw anyone from that quarter. Indeed, there is a sense in which the program was a substitute for a vibrant Sociology major. I called the new program Social Thought and Political Economy, which pretty well said, to anyone in the know, where I was coming from. The faceless gnomes who made up the course catalogue shortened this to STPEC, and this in turn came to be pronounced "Stepick." It sounded distressingly like an oil additive advertised by auto parts stores, but Stepick it was, and Stepick it has remained for more than thirty five years.
As one would expect, things got off to a slow start. The first few students who drifted into my office were attracted principally by the fact that there weren't any requirements. I did have one fascinating glimpse into how the other half of the university lives when an Engineering major walked in to ask about joining the new program. Since I had never met an Engineering major before, I quizzed him a bit on what sorts of things he was learning. At one point I asked whether there was much class discussion in Engineering courses. He said, "Well, we have a saying in Engineering. If you ask a question you have a problem." I allowed as how things were a bit different in Arts and Sciences.
When the program had been around long enough to have some seniors in it, I scheduled our very first senior seminar. It was taught by a member of the Political Science Department, William Connolly, and me. Bill and I taught a rather demanding seminar, and word of it filtered down to the Juniors, who grew terrified that they were not ready for so high-powered a theoretical exercise. They really did not feel that their course work was preparing them adequately. So I designed a Junior Seminar devoted to the classics of social theory that Bill and I had been presupposing. I cadged some money from the Provost to spring someone loose to teach it, and the Junior Seminar became a regular part of the program.
Several years later, I succeeded in recruiting a really high-powered Five College faculty member, Tracy Strong, to teach the Junior Seminar. Tracy, who had actually taught in Social Studies at Harvard, put together a demanding Junior Seminar, word of which filtered down to the Sophomores just entering STPEC. They didn't think they were ready to tackle a Junior Seminar like that, and wanted to know what they should take to prepare themselves. There really wasn't anything in the catalogue that fit the bill, so I invented a Philosophy Department course called Introduction to Social Philosophy, and taught it for several years.
This student-driven character of STPEC became the hallmark of the program, and remains so to the present day. To an extent that may be unique in American higher education, STPEC grew academically and intellectually in response to the expressed needs of the students. It was in that Introduction to Social Philosophy course, by the way, that my training in sensitivity to feminist concerns was brought to completion. I was lecturing one day to the ninety students who had signed up when a woman sitting near the back challenged me on my habit of saying "he" or "him" or "his" when referring to some unnamed hypothetical person. I stopped, thought about that for a bit, and allowed as how she was right. On the spot I adopted the practice of rigorously alternating male and female pronouns in any sentence I was uttering in which one or the other was not required by the actual gender of the person being referred to. I have continued that practice to the present day. It requires a certain presence of mind, but then, actually listening to what you are saying when you are saying it is not a bad habit to cultivate.
STPEC grew rapidly, until I had to schedule several sections of the junior and senior seminars. Budget crises had tightened things up, and departments were demanding TA return for the release of a professor's time. That is to say, to compensate a department for the release, I had to give them enough soft money to hire one of their graduate students as a Teaching Assistant. Each time my enrolments increased, I would throw myself on the mercy of the Provost. It was an old and well-known bureaucratic game, and the Provost, who was a friend of mine, knew perfectly well what I was doing. Finally, he drew the line and limited STPEC to no more than 100 majors. That made it a small but really respectable Arts and Sciences concentration.
Beyond the internecine warfare, there is not really much to say about the Philosophy Department because my colleagues, with the exception of the rump group, were not a very interesting collection of people. They were smart, in a pinched kind of way, but in twenty-one years, I do not think I ever had an interesting conversation with any of them. They seemed utterly uninterested in politics, history, literature, art, religion, or even philosophy itself beyond the confined of their narrow conception of that field. Their recruiting efforts were devoted entirely to replicating themselves as closely as was possible, short of cloning. One story will suffice.
In 1989-90, after a number of budgetary crises, the Department was authorized by the Dean to recruit. We advertised for someone in the general area of the philosophy of science, and a rather impressive group of people applied, most notable among them Michael Dunn from Indiana. Dunn had by then published two books and a huge number of very technical articles in logic and related fields. He was a real heavyweight. Although I was not myself directly interested in his work, I thought he would be a tremendous addition to the department. The search committee consisted of several of the usual suspects, plus a young Assistant Professor, Linda Wetzel, whose field was Philosophy of Mathematics. She had been recruited with the support of the majority faction, and seemed to be on a fast track to tenure.
Among the many applicants was a young man teaching at Yale, Phil Bricker, who had, to that point, published roughly three articles, none of which, so far as I could tell, was especially exciting. A department meeting was called, and the chair of the search committee announced that the committee had with great enthusiasm decided to recommend ... Bricker. Wetzel, who was more honest than prudent, burst out, "What? You can't be serious!" I knew then that she had no chance of being promoted with tenure. Gettier and Feldman and the others had obviously passed over Dunn because the sheer weight of his accomplishments would have shown them up. But Bricker was just about their speed. Sure enough, Bricker accepted, and as soon as he arrived threw in with the majority. He became indistinguishable from Feldman, Gettier, Sleigh, Jubien, or Robison. He well understood the inadvisability of publishing. Linda Wetzel is now at Georgetown.
The rest of the university, however, was vibrant with debate, innovation, and exploration. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst became, during the 1970's and early 1980's, one of the most interesting progressive campuses in America, despite the budget crises that crippled it periodically. How had this happened?
There are two facts that explain it, one relating to UMass's relation to the larger expansion of higher education in America, the other the consequence of one of the few acts of genuine administrative courage that I have witnessed during my half century in the Academy.
When World War II ended, American higher education was still dominated by the private sector, despite the existence of Land Grant institutions in every state. But the enormous demand for admission to college, sparked by the GI Bill, produced a huge and permanent shift to an enlarged public sector. State Universities proliferated campuses. State colleges became state universities. Community colleges were opened, and many of them made the transition to four year state institutions. The demand for faculty was so great that graduate students were being offered teaching positions before they had passed their qualifying exams. This expansion began to slow down in the middle and late sixties, but UMass came late to the process, and was still expanding rapidly when most State Universities were pausing to consolidate. The consequence was that in 1969, 70, 71, and 72, UMass was able to pick off some of the best young men and women emerging from top graduate schools.
Many of these new Assistant Professors came to North Amherst intending to stay for a few years and then move on to better schools, once they had published that first book or series of journal articles. But the Pioneer Valley is a seductive place, full of lovely houses in old communities at quite affordable prices. As they settled down, got married, and had children, moving seemed less and less important. Since they were bright and hard-working walking in the door, they soon became reasonably distinguished in their fields. The Sixties ended with America's withdrawal from Viet Nam and Nixon's resignation [the Sixties were always more in the early Seventies], but the Pioneer Valley, like Brigadoon, did not change. It was still sandals and candles and far out bumper stickers. A strong women's movement was born in the Valley, and in unlikely corners of the university, like German and Legal Studies and the Labor Center and the Afro-American Studies Department, groups of bright, gifted, unrepentant lefties settled in.
One day when we were having lunch, Herbert told me a lovely story about himself and his son, Peter, that has stayed in my memory because it so perfectly captures the way I feel about Patrick and Tobias [I must school myself not to write "Toby" when I am referring to his adult years.] After Marcuse left Brandeis, he taught for a time at UC Dan Diego. It is there that he taught Angela Davis. His son, Peter, was working in the area as a city planner. One day, Marcuse said, he was walking on the beach when a young man approached him, hesitantly and obviously nervous about disturbing him. Finally, the young man got his courage up and said, "Excuse me, but aren't you Peter Marcuse's father?" Herbert roared with laughter when he told the story, obviously delighted to take a back seat to his son. I am always tickled to be acknowledged as Patrick or Tobias' father.
Although both Patrick and Toby were preternaturally smart, they were, after all, little boys. Very early on, they acquired a taste for comic books, which accumulated at such a rate that we finally bought two big plastic laundry baskets for their rooms, to maintain some semblance of order. Both boys had the uncanny ability to plunge a hand into a basket filled with comics in order to pluck out just the one they wanted to read. After a bit, I grew curious about what was in them. Comics in my day had been rather benign affairs -- Richie Rich and Looney Tunes -- but these seemed to be a good deal more violent than that. So I sat down one day and read a couple of dozen chosen at random from the two baskets. I made two discoveries that reassured me. First of all, the vocabulary in the comics was actually rather sophisticated. You could learn more from reading them than you could from the readers the boys were given in school. The second discovery was even more surprising. The underlying moral sensibility of the comics was unswervingly liberal. The villains, to a man or woman, were basically good people who had become angry and bitter because of some terrible experience, such as falling into a vat of hot oil or being dropped from an airplane without a parachute. They weren't evil, they were just misunderstood. [Rather like Anakin Skywalker.] "Well", I thought, "that's all right then," and left the boys to their comic books. Now that both Patrick and Tobias are astonishingly successful men, people sometimes ask me what I did when they were little to produce this result. I just say, "I let them read comic books and watch television, and I spent a lot of time talking to them."
As I have observed, my years at Columbia were anomalous in one respect: while there, I had no involvement with other departments or programs. I had enjoyed my brief time as Head Tutor of Social Studies at Harvard, as well as my engagement with the last remnants of the Hutchins curriculum at Chicago, and I wanted to continue that sort of broadened intellectual activity. During my job interviews with Dean Seymour Shapiro, I had asked whether there would be an opportunity for me to create an undergraduate interdisciplinary program at UMass. "Sure," he said, "if you want to." Once I was settled into my new department, I cast about for some way to proceed. What I had in mind was a left-wing version of Social Studies. That may sound odd to any Harvard types reading this, because in the hermetic world of Harvard Square, Social Studies is considered a way-out radical program. I have no doubt that it attracts to itself the most progressive students at Harvard, but the program itself lies squarely in what I think of as the intellectual mainstream. Smith, Marx, Tyler, Weber, and Freud are the bread and butter of social theory. I had in mind something a bit edgier.
Vere Chappell suggested I talk to Jim Shaw , a young man who headed up The College of Arts and Sciences Information and Advising Center, or CASIAC. Jim warned me that folks at UMass did not like "empire builders," and he thought that I might do better to fly under the radar at first by creating my new program within something he called BDIC. [I was beginning to discover the State University penchant for acronyms]. This stood for "Bachelor's Degree in Individual Concentration," and was actually a rather intelligent way for students to create their own fields of concentration if none of the existing departmental majors got their scholarly juices flowing. All a student had to do to be a BDIC major was to find a faculty member willing to serve as advisor, work up a plan of courses drawn from a variety of departmental offerings, and run it past a reasonably complaisant committee. Shaw pointed out that there was nothing to stop me from crafting an interdisciplinary major and then inviting a group of students to sign on. Technically, each of them would be doing an individually designed major. It would simply be a coincidence that all the individual plans were the same.
My first move was to call a meeting of forty or more people from all five colleges whose interests would, I thought, incline them to join with me in this venture. I went out of my way to invite several of the Pioneer Valley's best known right-wing intellectuals. I was still under the influence of the Ivy League mindset, and simply assumed that it would be people from the four private colleges in the area who would be my best resource. Almost immediately, I learned some hard lessons that shaped the program from then on. UMass was growing so rapidly that people's teaching duties were rather fluid. A goodly number of the UMass people at the meeting assured me that they could get sprung loose from their departmental teaching obligations to participate in a new program. But the representatives of Amherst, Smith, and Mt. Holyoke were unanimous in expressing grave doubts that they could contribute as little as one course every two or three years. In the end, I gave up on the idea of a Five College program, and laid plans for an exclusively UMass structure.
My idea was simple enough. Students would cobble together courses from four or five different departments -- History, Economics, Philosophy, Political Science, principally -- and then take a two semester senior seminar designed just for them and taught by a brace of professors drawn from two different departments. I would handle all the administrative work, such as it was, so the only cost would be some freed up time of two professors each semester. The UMass Sociology Department was such a disaster that I had no expectation of being able to draw anyone from that quarter. Indeed, there is a sense in which the program was a substitute for a vibrant Sociology major. I called the new program Social Thought and Political Economy, which pretty well said, to anyone in the know, where I was coming from. The faceless gnomes who made up the course catalogue shortened this to STPEC, and this in turn came to be pronounced "Stepick." It sounded distressingly like an oil additive advertised by auto parts stores, but Stepick it was, and Stepick it has remained for more than thirty five years.
As one would expect, things got off to a slow start. The first few students who drifted into my office were attracted principally by the fact that there weren't any requirements. I did have one fascinating glimpse into how the other half of the university lives when an Engineering major walked in to ask about joining the new program. Since I had never met an Engineering major before, I quizzed him a bit on what sorts of things he was learning. At one point I asked whether there was much class discussion in Engineering courses. He said, "Well, we have a saying in Engineering. If you ask a question you have a problem." I allowed as how things were a bit different in Arts and Sciences.
When the program had been around long enough to have some seniors in it, I scheduled our very first senior seminar. It was taught by a member of the Political Science Department, William Connolly, and me. Bill and I taught a rather demanding seminar, and word of it filtered down to the Juniors, who grew terrified that they were not ready for so high-powered a theoretical exercise. They really did not feel that their course work was preparing them adequately. So I designed a Junior Seminar devoted to the classics of social theory that Bill and I had been presupposing. I cadged some money from the Provost to spring someone loose to teach it, and the Junior Seminar became a regular part of the program.
Several years later, I succeeded in recruiting a really high-powered Five College faculty member, Tracy Strong, to teach the Junior Seminar. Tracy, who had actually taught in Social Studies at Harvard, put together a demanding Junior Seminar, word of which filtered down to the Sophomores just entering STPEC. They didn't think they were ready to tackle a Junior Seminar like that, and wanted to know what they should take to prepare themselves. There really wasn't anything in the catalogue that fit the bill, so I invented a Philosophy Department course called Introduction to Social Philosophy, and taught it for several years.
This student-driven character of STPEC became the hallmark of the program, and remains so to the present day. To an extent that may be unique in American higher education, STPEC grew academically and intellectually in response to the expressed needs of the students. It was in that Introduction to Social Philosophy course, by the way, that my training in sensitivity to feminist concerns was brought to completion. I was lecturing one day to the ninety students who had signed up when a woman sitting near the back challenged me on my habit of saying "he" or "him" or "his" when referring to some unnamed hypothetical person. I stopped, thought about that for a bit, and allowed as how she was right. On the spot I adopted the practice of rigorously alternating male and female pronouns in any sentence I was uttering in which one or the other was not required by the actual gender of the person being referred to. I have continued that practice to the present day. It requires a certain presence of mind, but then, actually listening to what you are saying when you are saying it is not a bad habit to cultivate.
STPEC grew rapidly, until I had to schedule several sections of the junior and senior seminars. Budget crises had tightened things up, and departments were demanding TA return for the release of a professor's time. That is to say, to compensate a department for the release, I had to give them enough soft money to hire one of their graduate students as a Teaching Assistant. Each time my enrolments increased, I would throw myself on the mercy of the Provost. It was an old and well-known bureaucratic game, and the Provost, who was a friend of mine, knew perfectly well what I was doing. Finally, he drew the line and limited STPEC to no more than 100 majors. That made it a small but really respectable Arts and Sciences concentration.
Beyond the internecine warfare, there is not really much to say about the Philosophy Department because my colleagues, with the exception of the rump group, were not a very interesting collection of people. They were smart, in a pinched kind of way, but in twenty-one years, I do not think I ever had an interesting conversation with any of them. They seemed utterly uninterested in politics, history, literature, art, religion, or even philosophy itself beyond the confined of their narrow conception of that field. Their recruiting efforts were devoted entirely to replicating themselves as closely as was possible, short of cloning. One story will suffice.
In 1989-90, after a number of budgetary crises, the Department was authorized by the Dean to recruit. We advertised for someone in the general area of the philosophy of science, and a rather impressive group of people applied, most notable among them Michael Dunn from Indiana. Dunn had by then published two books and a huge number of very technical articles in logic and related fields. He was a real heavyweight. Although I was not myself directly interested in his work, I thought he would be a tremendous addition to the department. The search committee consisted of several of the usual suspects, plus a young Assistant Professor, Linda Wetzel, whose field was Philosophy of Mathematics. She had been recruited with the support of the majority faction, and seemed to be on a fast track to tenure.
Among the many applicants was a young man teaching at Yale, Phil Bricker, who had, to that point, published roughly three articles, none of which, so far as I could tell, was especially exciting. A department meeting was called, and the chair of the search committee announced that the committee had with great enthusiasm decided to recommend ... Bricker. Wetzel, who was more honest than prudent, burst out, "What? You can't be serious!" I knew then that she had no chance of being promoted with tenure. Gettier and Feldman and the others had obviously passed over Dunn because the sheer weight of his accomplishments would have shown them up. But Bricker was just about their speed. Sure enough, Bricker accepted, and as soon as he arrived threw in with the majority. He became indistinguishable from Feldman, Gettier, Sleigh, Jubien, or Robison. He well understood the inadvisability of publishing. Linda Wetzel is now at Georgetown.
The rest of the university, however, was vibrant with debate, innovation, and exploration. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst became, during the 1970's and early 1980's, one of the most interesting progressive campuses in America, despite the budget crises that crippled it periodically. How had this happened?
There are two facts that explain it, one relating to UMass's relation to the larger expansion of higher education in America, the other the consequence of one of the few acts of genuine administrative courage that I have witnessed during my half century in the Academy.
When World War II ended, American higher education was still dominated by the private sector, despite the existence of Land Grant institutions in every state. But the enormous demand for admission to college, sparked by the GI Bill, produced a huge and permanent shift to an enlarged public sector. State Universities proliferated campuses. State colleges became state universities. Community colleges were opened, and many of them made the transition to four year state institutions. The demand for faculty was so great that graduate students were being offered teaching positions before they had passed their qualifying exams. This expansion began to slow down in the middle and late sixties, but UMass came late to the process, and was still expanding rapidly when most State Universities were pausing to consolidate. The consequence was that in 1969, 70, 71, and 72, UMass was able to pick off some of the best young men and women emerging from top graduate schools.
Many of these new Assistant Professors came to North Amherst intending to stay for a few years and then move on to better schools, once they had published that first book or series of journal articles. But the Pioneer Valley is a seductive place, full of lovely houses in old communities at quite affordable prices. As they settled down, got married, and had children, moving seemed less and less important. Since they were bright and hard-working walking in the door, they soon became reasonably distinguished in their fields. The Sixties ended with America's withdrawal from Viet Nam and Nixon's resignation [the Sixties were always more in the early Seventies], but the Pioneer Valley, like Brigadoon, did not change. It was still sandals and candles and far out bumper stickers. A strong women's movement was born in the Valley, and in unlikely corners of the university, like German and Legal Studies and the Labor Center and the Afro-American Studies Department, groups of bright, gifted, unrepentant lefties settled in.
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
MEMOIR VOLUME TWO CHAPTER FOUR SECOND INSTALLMENT
I confess that I found the behavior of my new colleagues rather puzzling. These people apparently thought of themselves as analytic philosophers. Well and good. Before I turned eighteen, I had studied with Willard van Orman Quine, Nelson Goodman, and Hao Wang. I knew more logic than they did, and in my own work, I used mathematics a good deal more sophisticated than anything they knew or ever used. What on earth were they so uptight about? It took me a very long time to develop some sense of who they thought they were and what they thought they were doing. The short of it seems to have been this: Having taken over what they thought of as a somnolent department, they were intent on turning it into a world-class outpost of whatever it was that Roderick Chisholm did at Brown. John, Ann, Leonard, Bob, and I were so much dead wood, in their view, taking up places that could be better filled with real philosophers.
Something else was going on that I had never encountered before, although I understand that it is rather common in Philosophy departments around the country. These men had formed themselves into a clique, around which they gathered a favored group of the students in the graduate program. Once Fred Feldman got his hands on the administrative position of Graduate Program Director -- usually a chore shoved on some poor unsuspecting junior member of the a department -- he used that position to advance an agenda. The favored in-group of students were given such Teaching Assistantships as the department had available. Feldman counseled students against taking my courses or those of the other outsiders. He formed dissertation committees so that we would be excluded from them, especially if the committees were for the in-group of students. There was a good deal of snide, smarmy, snickering smirking about the our unphilosophical work.
At one point, I served on a committee with Gettier and Robison whose task it was to divide up the available merit money for raises. [Because this was a State university, this task was handed to the department, rather than being reserved for the Dean]. Leonard Ehrlich had just published a book on Jaspers, so I proposed that he receive a merit raise. Neither Robison nor Gettier had ever published a book, of course, but that did not stop Robison from rejecting the proposal, saying that it would have been better if Leonard had not published the book.
I found this behavior appalling, mystifying, and simply infra dignitatem. In every one of the departments of which I had previously been a member, there were of course some professors whom the students thought of as the stars and others who were regarded as of lesser distinction or even intelligence. Everyone at Harvard knew that Quine was just plain smarter than Donald Williams or John Wild [or anyone else, for that matter], but every member of the department was treated with courtesy and accorded at least pro forma respect. At Chicago, we youngsters had waged a battle against the oppressive reputation of Richard McKeon, to be sure. Still, no one was kept off dissertation committees. At Columbia, as well, those of us gathered around Ernest Nagel thought of ourselves as the new wave, but we had great respect for Justus Buchler, for Jack Randall, for Jimmy Gutmann, and the rest of the old timers. It would never have occurred to any of us at those places to say, or even think, that what they did was "not philosophy." I am afraid I reveal my elitist upbringing when I say that I thought of my colleagues as just never having learned how a gentleman or gentle lady behaves in the Academy.
As the years went by, Bob and I grew more frustrated with the party-line, lockstep behavior of the members of the majority. When we attended a department meeting to discuss a candidate for the department or a proposed change in the rules of the graduate program, there would be a lively discussion that gave every appearance of being a genuine exchange of views, but the votes were always the same. After a while, Bob took to playing a little game. At the beginning of each discussion, he would quite visibly lay a folded piece of paper on the desk. After the vote was taken, he would unfold the paper. There on it would be written the vote count. He was never wrong.
Oh, there were moments when it appeared that one or another of the boys was going to side with us on some issue, large or small. The Olympia Snowe of the department was Gareth Matthews. He sighed, he meditated, he hesitated, he weighed the pros and cons, he acknowledged the merits of our side of the debate, he confessed that he was seriously tempted to endorse our view. But always, in the end, our arguments were just not quite strong enough to win him over. In the twenty-one years that I sat in those meetings, not once did Matthews ever break from the party line. Mitch McConnell would have been impressed.
At one point, after years of frustration, Bob, Ann, John, Leonard, and I went to the then chair, Mike Jubien, to propose that we be permitted to design a Master's Program in Political Philosophy and Continental Philosophy, in order to give us some role, however secondary, in the graduate program. Mike's response was to suggest that it might be better if we left the department.
All of this gets me way ahead of my story, for at the end of that very first year on Barrett Place, something happened that had a far greater impact on my life, and the life of our family, than the small mindedness of my colleagues in philosophy. On July 11, 1972, the American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer squared off against the world chess champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland for the championship of the chess world. There were no live television feeds in those days, but public television committed itself to a series of programs in real time reporting on the match. PBS recruited Shelby Lyman to host a program in which, as each game was played, he would receive telephoned reports of the moves and put them on a chess board hanging on a wall with slots for the pieces. Lyman himself was not a very strong chess player, although he had done yeoman work for the United States Chess Federation [USCF] in promoting the game. With him in the studio, however, were some of the strongest players in America, and as each move was announced, they would analyze it, try to divine the strategy behind it, look for traps and loopholes, all the while pretty much rooting for Fischer.
I had learned chess from my father, and though it was not my favorite game -- I preferred the game of Go -- I took out my lovely wooden chess set, set up the pieces on a board in the family room, and followed along as Lyman announced the moves and the experts analyzed them. Little Patrick was four and a half then, still improving his talking [he was a late talker], but he watched me as I stared at the television set. Something clicked inside him. The next year, when he was attending the Smith College Campus School, he asked me to come to an Open House of the school, which was just down the hill from our house. I went along and followed him as he showed me his school. In one room, the teachers had set up a variety of board games on the floor -- Monopoly, checkers, Chinese checkers, and chess, among others. Patrick pulled me to the chess board and said, "Teach me that." "Well," I said, "that is a rather complicated game. How about this one?," pointing to checkers.
Patrick was adamant, so when we got home, I took out the chess board and taught him the moves. Immediately, he wanted to play a game against me. I took him through a game, which in the end I won. Patrick was very upset by that, and wanted to play again. Pretty soon, we were playing every day. At first I won all the games. Then I let him win some. Then he won some on his own, and it became a genuine contest. Several years later, I bought Patrick a copy of Bobby Fischer's book, My Sixty Favorite Games. He taught himself to read chess notation more or less at the same time that he learned to read words. In the morning, when I woke up, I would hear him in his room, playing chess, the pieces clicking as he put them down on the board.
So began a long, complex journey that ended, many years later, with Patrick becoming one of the strongest chess players in America, an International Grandmaster known throughout the entire chess world, twice the United States Champion, a second to Anand in his world championship match against Kasparov, a widely read chess journalist, and for some years in his twenties, a chess professional who supported himself over the board. That is a very long story, to which I shall return many times. One of the most fascinating and challenging conundrums I faced as a father was how to raise Patrick as a healthy, happy, normal boy, while at the same time acknowledging, supporting, and endorsing his emergence as a force in the world of international adult chess.
I have spoken about the inwardness of Patrick's nervous system as a baby. That quality manifested itself in many ways as he grew older. While still a little boy, he exhibited extraordinary powers of concentration. As a three year old, he loved those wooden PlaySkool puzzles consisting of six or eight big pieces that fit into a wooden frame to make an elephant or a flower or a dog. He would sit on the floor fitting the pieces into the frame, so absorbed that if his back was turned when I walked into the room, he would not hear me say, "Hello, Peege." [Peege was my nickname for him, derived from his initials, P. G.] Alarmed, we had his hearing tested at the world-famous Clarke School for the Deaf, which was several blocks from Barrett Place, but there was nothing wrong with his hearing. He was just concentrating.
I thought of that some years later when I took Patrick, now a boy of twelve or thirteen, to a big deal tournament in New York City featuring some of the strongest players in America. Patrick sat down to play his first game, which like all serious chess games was played under time constraints. Each player in the tournament had two hours to make the first forty moves [a time control known in the chess world as "forty and two."] Patrick had the black pieces, so his opponent made the first move and pressed the plunger, starting Patrick's clock. It was an opening move that Patrick had not seen before. He stared at the board, put his chin on his hands, and thought. And thought. And thought. An hour and a half went by, while Patrick did not move a muscle, his two hours ticking away. Finally, Patrick lifted his hand, made his first move, and went on to win the game.
What did chess mean to Patrick, to absorb so completely his attention and youthful energies? I got a clue several years later. I had taken Patrick to school with me, "to see where Daddy works," and on the way home I took the back way on Rocky Hill Road to avoid the traffic on Route 9. When we drove past the cemetery, Patrick pointed to a small mausoleum and asked what it was. "That is a place where someone is buried," I said, "and his family have put up that structure to remember him by. It is called a mausoleum. Sometimes people put statues on top of them." Patrick thought about that for several miles, and then said, in a quiet voice, "I know what would be a good mausoleum for you, Daddy." "Oh yes," I said in the calmest voice I could muster, clutching the steering wheel firmly with both hands, "and what would that be?" "Well," he said, getting rather excited, "it would be laid out like a chess board, and the white king would be turned over on its side, showing that it had been mated." After that, I ceased wondering why Patrick was playing chess.
Since I will be returning to Patrick's chess career a number of times in these memoirs, perhaps this is as good a time as any to explain a little inside baseball to those readers who are not familiar with the world of competitive chess. Chess in the United States is overseen by the U. S. Chess Federation, or USCF. The USCF organizes and authorizes tournaments and keeps careful records of how everyone does in them so that it can apply its complicated formula to the results and calculate everyone's USCF chess rating. The ratings run from a low of about 200 for absolute novices just learning the game, to as high as 2700 or even higher, for world famous players. A rating of 2000 earns you the title of "expert." [Below that, you are an A, B, C, D, etc player]. At 2200, you are awarded the title of Master, and at 2400 the title of Senior Master. Whenever two players play a game, the USCF uses a formula to calculate the probability that the winner will beat the loser, based on their ratings before the game. The bigger the gap between the two players, the more rating points the weaker player gets if he wins, but the fewer points the stronger player gets if she wins [the theory is that the stronger player figured to win anyway.] After each tournament, each player's rating is updated to reflect his or her record against the players he or she beat or lost to in the tournament. Over time and many games, a player's rating comes to reflect pretty accurately his or her strength over the board.
This is all just in America. In the world at large, chess is overseen by the Féderation Internationale des Eschecs, or FIDE. The same formula is used for calculating FIDE ratings, but in general your FIDE rating is somewhat lower than your USCF rating. You can only earn FIDE rating points by playing in FIDE sponsored tournaments against other players with FIDE ratings. The really strong players are the ones who have earned the title of International Master or International Grandmaster, this latter being the highest title one can earn. You cannot become either an IM or GM simply by accumulating points. You must play in a very strong tournament entered by a number of players already holding those titles, and your performance must be at a level judged [by a formula] to be of IM or GM quality. Each time you do that you "earn a norm," and after earning three IM norms or GM norms you become an IM or a GM. Once awarded by FIDE, that title is yours for life.
All of this lay far ahead of Patrick when we played our little games, and neither of us at that point knew anything about the USCF, FIDE, ratings, norms, or the rest of the arcana of the chess world.
What of little Toby, Patrick's brother? I must now confront a problem that bedevils all memoirists. In my mind, I am back in the early 1970's, when both Patrick and Toby were little boys. But I am writing these words in 2010, when I know, of course, what both of them have become. That darling tow-headed little one and a half year old boy is now forty years old. He is a brilliant law professor, the leading young civil proceduralist in the American legal profession. He is also a handsome, proud gay man who served as the Co-Chair of the Advisory Committee on LGBT issues to the Obama campaign, and is the leading voice in the country on LGBT legal issues. He has long ceased -- and here I write with just a tinge of parental regret -- to be "Toby" either to the world or to his family. He is now "Tobias," Professor Tobias Barrington Wolff of the University of Pennsylvania Law Faculty.
There is an old story about Mrs. Shapiro, who takes her two little baby boys out in the stroller for a walk. On the street in front of her apartment she runs into Mrs. Finkelstein, who coos and says, "Who have we here?" Mrs. Shapiro replies, "The one on the left is the doctor. The one on the right is the professor." I hope I am not simply channeling my inner Mrs. Shapiro when I say that I have two trophy sons.
It was not difficult to see, very early on, that Patrick was headed for distinction, but what of little Toby? He was not a precocious child, in the way that Patrick was. To be sure, since Toby learned to talk early and Patrick learned to talk late, it seemed as though they began to speak at roughly the same time. And the difference I perceived in their nervous systems in those very first weeks continued to unfold. Toby was as outgoing as Patrick was inward-looking. This was difficult for Toby, who wanted to play with his big brother but was repeatedly rebuffed. "It's not fair," Toby would protest. "Patrick won't play with me." "Sure it is, Toby," Patrick would respond. "I don't want to play with you either." [There was just a hint of Sidney Morgenbesser in Patrick, I am afraid.] Patrick could spend an entire semester in school without really getting to know the children in is class. Toby would come home the first day knowing not only the names of his classmates but the names of their brothers and sisters as well. Almost immediately, Toby formed a close friendship with little Nicky Clausen, who lived at the bottom of Barrett Place. They became inseparable, so much so that people seeing them together thought they were brother and sister.
And yet, despite the absence of any stereotypically precocious behavior, very early on, I could tell that Toby was fiercely intelligent. I used to talk a great deal to my boys, but I also listened to them. Perhaps because of my experience listening to students and reading their papers, I have become extremely sensitive to nuances of language -- to grammar, phrasing, syntax. Even as a little boy, Toby used language with a precision of word choice and syntax that I found remarkable. It was not so much what he was saying -- that was pretty much what you would expect from a three or four or five or six year old -- but just how he was saying it. Toby also exhibited, even then, a quality that now defines his adult character. It is something that the ancient Romans called gravitas. The adult Tobias has a wisdom, a balance, a sensitivity of moral sensibility that is remarkable even in a forty-year old, and was clearly apparent, at least to me, in the little boy he then was.
It was not easy being Toby in that family, what with two professorial parents and a big brother becoming a force in the chess world. Toby came up to me one day in the kitchen, looking rather crestfallen. He must have been nine or so. "What's the matter, Toby"" I asked, rather concerned by the manifest sadness on a face almost always wreathed in smiles. "Daddy," he replied, "I am the only one in the family without a national reputation."
Something else was going on that I had never encountered before, although I understand that it is rather common in Philosophy departments around the country. These men had formed themselves into a clique, around which they gathered a favored group of the students in the graduate program. Once Fred Feldman got his hands on the administrative position of Graduate Program Director -- usually a chore shoved on some poor unsuspecting junior member of the a department -- he used that position to advance an agenda. The favored in-group of students were given such Teaching Assistantships as the department had available. Feldman counseled students against taking my courses or those of the other outsiders. He formed dissertation committees so that we would be excluded from them, especially if the committees were for the in-group of students. There was a good deal of snide, smarmy, snickering smirking about the our unphilosophical work.
At one point, I served on a committee with Gettier and Robison whose task it was to divide up the available merit money for raises. [Because this was a State university, this task was handed to the department, rather than being reserved for the Dean]. Leonard Ehrlich had just published a book on Jaspers, so I proposed that he receive a merit raise. Neither Robison nor Gettier had ever published a book, of course, but that did not stop Robison from rejecting the proposal, saying that it would have been better if Leonard had not published the book.
I found this behavior appalling, mystifying, and simply infra dignitatem. In every one of the departments of which I had previously been a member, there were of course some professors whom the students thought of as the stars and others who were regarded as of lesser distinction or even intelligence. Everyone at Harvard knew that Quine was just plain smarter than Donald Williams or John Wild [or anyone else, for that matter], but every member of the department was treated with courtesy and accorded at least pro forma respect. At Chicago, we youngsters had waged a battle against the oppressive reputation of Richard McKeon, to be sure. Still, no one was kept off dissertation committees. At Columbia, as well, those of us gathered around Ernest Nagel thought of ourselves as the new wave, but we had great respect for Justus Buchler, for Jack Randall, for Jimmy Gutmann, and the rest of the old timers. It would never have occurred to any of us at those places to say, or even think, that what they did was "not philosophy." I am afraid I reveal my elitist upbringing when I say that I thought of my colleagues as just never having learned how a gentleman or gentle lady behaves in the Academy.
As the years went by, Bob and I grew more frustrated with the party-line, lockstep behavior of the members of the majority. When we attended a department meeting to discuss a candidate for the department or a proposed change in the rules of the graduate program, there would be a lively discussion that gave every appearance of being a genuine exchange of views, but the votes were always the same. After a while, Bob took to playing a little game. At the beginning of each discussion, he would quite visibly lay a folded piece of paper on the desk. After the vote was taken, he would unfold the paper. There on it would be written the vote count. He was never wrong.
Oh, there were moments when it appeared that one or another of the boys was going to side with us on some issue, large or small. The Olympia Snowe of the department was Gareth Matthews. He sighed, he meditated, he hesitated, he weighed the pros and cons, he acknowledged the merits of our side of the debate, he confessed that he was seriously tempted to endorse our view. But always, in the end, our arguments were just not quite strong enough to win him over. In the twenty-one years that I sat in those meetings, not once did Matthews ever break from the party line. Mitch McConnell would have been impressed.
At one point, after years of frustration, Bob, Ann, John, Leonard, and I went to the then chair, Mike Jubien, to propose that we be permitted to design a Master's Program in Political Philosophy and Continental Philosophy, in order to give us some role, however secondary, in the graduate program. Mike's response was to suggest that it might be better if we left the department.
All of this gets me way ahead of my story, for at the end of that very first year on Barrett Place, something happened that had a far greater impact on my life, and the life of our family, than the small mindedness of my colleagues in philosophy. On July 11, 1972, the American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer squared off against the world chess champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland for the championship of the chess world. There were no live television feeds in those days, but public television committed itself to a series of programs in real time reporting on the match. PBS recruited Shelby Lyman to host a program in which, as each game was played, he would receive telephoned reports of the moves and put them on a chess board hanging on a wall with slots for the pieces. Lyman himself was not a very strong chess player, although he had done yeoman work for the United States Chess Federation [USCF] in promoting the game. With him in the studio, however, were some of the strongest players in America, and as each move was announced, they would analyze it, try to divine the strategy behind it, look for traps and loopholes, all the while pretty much rooting for Fischer.
I had learned chess from my father, and though it was not my favorite game -- I preferred the game of Go -- I took out my lovely wooden chess set, set up the pieces on a board in the family room, and followed along as Lyman announced the moves and the experts analyzed them. Little Patrick was four and a half then, still improving his talking [he was a late talker], but he watched me as I stared at the television set. Something clicked inside him. The next year, when he was attending the Smith College Campus School, he asked me to come to an Open House of the school, which was just down the hill from our house. I went along and followed him as he showed me his school. In one room, the teachers had set up a variety of board games on the floor -- Monopoly, checkers, Chinese checkers, and chess, among others. Patrick pulled me to the chess board and said, "Teach me that." "Well," I said, "that is a rather complicated game. How about this one?," pointing to checkers.
Patrick was adamant, so when we got home, I took out the chess board and taught him the moves. Immediately, he wanted to play a game against me. I took him through a game, which in the end I won. Patrick was very upset by that, and wanted to play again. Pretty soon, we were playing every day. At first I won all the games. Then I let him win some. Then he won some on his own, and it became a genuine contest. Several years later, I bought Patrick a copy of Bobby Fischer's book, My Sixty Favorite Games. He taught himself to read chess notation more or less at the same time that he learned to read words. In the morning, when I woke up, I would hear him in his room, playing chess, the pieces clicking as he put them down on the board.
So began a long, complex journey that ended, many years later, with Patrick becoming one of the strongest chess players in America, an International Grandmaster known throughout the entire chess world, twice the United States Champion, a second to Anand in his world championship match against Kasparov, a widely read chess journalist, and for some years in his twenties, a chess professional who supported himself over the board. That is a very long story, to which I shall return many times. One of the most fascinating and challenging conundrums I faced as a father was how to raise Patrick as a healthy, happy, normal boy, while at the same time acknowledging, supporting, and endorsing his emergence as a force in the world of international adult chess.
I have spoken about the inwardness of Patrick's nervous system as a baby. That quality manifested itself in many ways as he grew older. While still a little boy, he exhibited extraordinary powers of concentration. As a three year old, he loved those wooden PlaySkool puzzles consisting of six or eight big pieces that fit into a wooden frame to make an elephant or a flower or a dog. He would sit on the floor fitting the pieces into the frame, so absorbed that if his back was turned when I walked into the room, he would not hear me say, "Hello, Peege." [Peege was my nickname for him, derived from his initials, P. G.] Alarmed, we had his hearing tested at the world-famous Clarke School for the Deaf, which was several blocks from Barrett Place, but there was nothing wrong with his hearing. He was just concentrating.
I thought of that some years later when I took Patrick, now a boy of twelve or thirteen, to a big deal tournament in New York City featuring some of the strongest players in America. Patrick sat down to play his first game, which like all serious chess games was played under time constraints. Each player in the tournament had two hours to make the first forty moves [a time control known in the chess world as "forty and two."] Patrick had the black pieces, so his opponent made the first move and pressed the plunger, starting Patrick's clock. It was an opening move that Patrick had not seen before. He stared at the board, put his chin on his hands, and thought. And thought. And thought. An hour and a half went by, while Patrick did not move a muscle, his two hours ticking away. Finally, Patrick lifted his hand, made his first move, and went on to win the game.
What did chess mean to Patrick, to absorb so completely his attention and youthful energies? I got a clue several years later. I had taken Patrick to school with me, "to see where Daddy works," and on the way home I took the back way on Rocky Hill Road to avoid the traffic on Route 9. When we drove past the cemetery, Patrick pointed to a small mausoleum and asked what it was. "That is a place where someone is buried," I said, "and his family have put up that structure to remember him by. It is called a mausoleum. Sometimes people put statues on top of them." Patrick thought about that for several miles, and then said, in a quiet voice, "I know what would be a good mausoleum for you, Daddy." "Oh yes," I said in the calmest voice I could muster, clutching the steering wheel firmly with both hands, "and what would that be?" "Well," he said, getting rather excited, "it would be laid out like a chess board, and the white king would be turned over on its side, showing that it had been mated." After that, I ceased wondering why Patrick was playing chess.
Since I will be returning to Patrick's chess career a number of times in these memoirs, perhaps this is as good a time as any to explain a little inside baseball to those readers who are not familiar with the world of competitive chess. Chess in the United States is overseen by the U. S. Chess Federation, or USCF. The USCF organizes and authorizes tournaments and keeps careful records of how everyone does in them so that it can apply its complicated formula to the results and calculate everyone's USCF chess rating. The ratings run from a low of about 200 for absolute novices just learning the game, to as high as 2700 or even higher, for world famous players. A rating of 2000 earns you the title of "expert." [Below that, you are an A, B, C, D, etc player]. At 2200, you are awarded the title of Master, and at 2400 the title of Senior Master. Whenever two players play a game, the USCF uses a formula to calculate the probability that the winner will beat the loser, based on their ratings before the game. The bigger the gap between the two players, the more rating points the weaker player gets if he wins, but the fewer points the stronger player gets if she wins [the theory is that the stronger player figured to win anyway.] After each tournament, each player's rating is updated to reflect his or her record against the players he or she beat or lost to in the tournament. Over time and many games, a player's rating comes to reflect pretty accurately his or her strength over the board.
This is all just in America. In the world at large, chess is overseen by the Féderation Internationale des Eschecs, or FIDE. The same formula is used for calculating FIDE ratings, but in general your FIDE rating is somewhat lower than your USCF rating. You can only earn FIDE rating points by playing in FIDE sponsored tournaments against other players with FIDE ratings. The really strong players are the ones who have earned the title of International Master or International Grandmaster, this latter being the highest title one can earn. You cannot become either an IM or GM simply by accumulating points. You must play in a very strong tournament entered by a number of players already holding those titles, and your performance must be at a level judged [by a formula] to be of IM or GM quality. Each time you do that you "earn a norm," and after earning three IM norms or GM norms you become an IM or a GM. Once awarded by FIDE, that title is yours for life.
All of this lay far ahead of Patrick when we played our little games, and neither of us at that point knew anything about the USCF, FIDE, ratings, norms, or the rest of the arcana of the chess world.
What of little Toby, Patrick's brother? I must now confront a problem that bedevils all memoirists. In my mind, I am back in the early 1970's, when both Patrick and Toby were little boys. But I am writing these words in 2010, when I know, of course, what both of them have become. That darling tow-headed little one and a half year old boy is now forty years old. He is a brilliant law professor, the leading young civil proceduralist in the American legal profession. He is also a handsome, proud gay man who served as the Co-Chair of the Advisory Committee on LGBT issues to the Obama campaign, and is the leading voice in the country on LGBT legal issues. He has long ceased -- and here I write with just a tinge of parental regret -- to be "Toby" either to the world or to his family. He is now "Tobias," Professor Tobias Barrington Wolff of the University of Pennsylvania Law Faculty.
There is an old story about Mrs. Shapiro, who takes her two little baby boys out in the stroller for a walk. On the street in front of her apartment she runs into Mrs. Finkelstein, who coos and says, "Who have we here?" Mrs. Shapiro replies, "The one on the left is the doctor. The one on the right is the professor." I hope I am not simply channeling my inner Mrs. Shapiro when I say that I have two trophy sons.
It was not difficult to see, very early on, that Patrick was headed for distinction, but what of little Toby? He was not a precocious child, in the way that Patrick was. To be sure, since Toby learned to talk early and Patrick learned to talk late, it seemed as though they began to speak at roughly the same time. And the difference I perceived in their nervous systems in those very first weeks continued to unfold. Toby was as outgoing as Patrick was inward-looking. This was difficult for Toby, who wanted to play with his big brother but was repeatedly rebuffed. "It's not fair," Toby would protest. "Patrick won't play with me." "Sure it is, Toby," Patrick would respond. "I don't want to play with you either." [There was just a hint of Sidney Morgenbesser in Patrick, I am afraid.] Patrick could spend an entire semester in school without really getting to know the children in is class. Toby would come home the first day knowing not only the names of his classmates but the names of their brothers and sisters as well. Almost immediately, Toby formed a close friendship with little Nicky Clausen, who lived at the bottom of Barrett Place. They became inseparable, so much so that people seeing them together thought they were brother and sister.
And yet, despite the absence of any stereotypically precocious behavior, very early on, I could tell that Toby was fiercely intelligent. I used to talk a great deal to my boys, but I also listened to them. Perhaps because of my experience listening to students and reading their papers, I have become extremely sensitive to nuances of language -- to grammar, phrasing, syntax. Even as a little boy, Toby used language with a precision of word choice and syntax that I found remarkable. It was not so much what he was saying -- that was pretty much what you would expect from a three or four or five or six year old -- but just how he was saying it. Toby also exhibited, even then, a quality that now defines his adult character. It is something that the ancient Romans called gravitas. The adult Tobias has a wisdom, a balance, a sensitivity of moral sensibility that is remarkable even in a forty-year old, and was clearly apparent, at least to me, in the little boy he then was.
It was not easy being Toby in that family, what with two professorial parents and a big brother becoming a force in the chess world. Toby came up to me one day in the kitchen, looking rather crestfallen. He must have been nine or so. "What's the matter, Toby"" I asked, rather concerned by the manifest sadness on a face almost always wreathed in smiles. "Daddy," he replied, "I am the only one in the family without a national reputation."
Monday, 17 May 2010
BEWARE OF SATAN QUOTING SCRIPTURE
I got up at 2 a.m. and spent some time idly surfing the web. [Us old guys do that a lot. I never sleep through the night]. On a lark, I decided to read the op ed column of one of the NY TIMES' resident right wingers, Ross Douthat. Properly understood [but of course not the way Douthat intended it], the column is right out of Karl Marx. I loved it. Douthat is complaining about the fact that for decades and more now, every time those in power in the United States or Europe screw things up really badly because of the unwisdom of their decisions, their response is to further consolidate their power as a way of "fixing" what they have done. The next time they screw up and plunge the world into disaster, they respond by yet another round of consolidation. He gives as examples TARP, Health Care Reform, the Euro Zone and the current Greek meltdown, the concentration of executive power in the hands of the President, and so forth.
I have analyzed this tendency in my paper "The Future of Socialism" [on line at UPenn Law School -- Google it]. It is exactly what Marx meant by the new system of social relations of production being born in the womb of the old. The reason those in charge do not react to their failures by going backwards to a less centralized time is that, by their conception of rationality, the rational thing to do is to take greater control of what seems to be out of control, which is to say to centralize. Oh, mere self-interest plays a role, but it would be a big mistake to suppose that is all that is at play. Why does Obama ratify the seizures of executive authority pioneered by George W. Bush? Because, confronted with terrorist incidents, it is the rational thing to do. Why does a progressive like Krugman call for greater regulatory oversight? Because that is the rational way to deal with an economic system that is "out of control."
In short, the technical and systemic pre-conditions for socialism are being born in the womb of world finance capitalism, for socialism requires the very highest level of rational management of the entire economy, something that nineteenth century capitalists were completely incapable of attempting, and that even twentieth century capitalists could only achieve fitfully. This is the deeper reason why the right cries "socialism" at the actions of the Congress and the proposals of the President. Although they do not really understand what they are saying, they are, in an odd way, on to something. This is also why the very people who think of themselves as Masters of the Universe celebrate a "free market" while they devote their lives to enslaving it. These people are not stupid.
So, as I ask in my essay, if this is so, why aren't we on the left having any fun? The short answer is this: the ever greater establishment of central control over the world economy is being carried out in the interests of the haves, not of the have nots. Now, those interests are not totally opposed. Both the haves and the have nots have an interest in avoiding economic crashes, because both suffer from those crashes [although the have nots may starve to death as a consequence of the crashes, whereas the haves simply must pause in their endless accumulation of wealth]. But Marx was, alas, wrong in believing that the consolidation process by those at the top of the economic pyramid would, as an unintended consequence, also consolidate the power of those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Marx was almost certainly right in expecting ever greater instability -- greater crashes. But though he saw that this would provoke ever greater consolidation of capital [what Douthat is calling consolidation of power, because of course it is not polite on the right to speak of "capital"], Marx failed to anticipate the fragmentation and collapse of the working class movement that was being born in his day.
None of this makes for happy reading, I am afraid. We must all fight as hard as we can to ameliorate the injuries inflicted on the many by the depredations of the few. But I cannot find it in my mind [though I can easily find it in my heart] to hope that the future holds the promise of a humane socialism.
I have analyzed this tendency in my paper "The Future of Socialism" [on line at UPenn Law School -- Google it]. It is exactly what Marx meant by the new system of social relations of production being born in the womb of the old. The reason those in charge do not react to their failures by going backwards to a less centralized time is that, by their conception of rationality, the rational thing to do is to take greater control of what seems to be out of control, which is to say to centralize. Oh, mere self-interest plays a role, but it would be a big mistake to suppose that is all that is at play. Why does Obama ratify the seizures of executive authority pioneered by George W. Bush? Because, confronted with terrorist incidents, it is the rational thing to do. Why does a progressive like Krugman call for greater regulatory oversight? Because that is the rational way to deal with an economic system that is "out of control."
In short, the technical and systemic pre-conditions for socialism are being born in the womb of world finance capitalism, for socialism requires the very highest level of rational management of the entire economy, something that nineteenth century capitalists were completely incapable of attempting, and that even twentieth century capitalists could only achieve fitfully. This is the deeper reason why the right cries "socialism" at the actions of the Congress and the proposals of the President. Although they do not really understand what they are saying, they are, in an odd way, on to something. This is also why the very people who think of themselves as Masters of the Universe celebrate a "free market" while they devote their lives to enslaving it. These people are not stupid.
So, as I ask in my essay, if this is so, why aren't we on the left having any fun? The short answer is this: the ever greater establishment of central control over the world economy is being carried out in the interests of the haves, not of the have nots. Now, those interests are not totally opposed. Both the haves and the have nots have an interest in avoiding economic crashes, because both suffer from those crashes [although the have nots may starve to death as a consequence of the crashes, whereas the haves simply must pause in their endless accumulation of wealth]. But Marx was, alas, wrong in believing that the consolidation process by those at the top of the economic pyramid would, as an unintended consequence, also consolidate the power of those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Marx was almost certainly right in expecting ever greater instability -- greater crashes. But though he saw that this would provoke ever greater consolidation of capital [what Douthat is calling consolidation of power, because of course it is not polite on the right to speak of "capital"], Marx failed to anticipate the fragmentation and collapse of the working class movement that was being born in his day.
None of this makes for happy reading, I am afraid. We must all fight as hard as we can to ameliorate the injuries inflicted on the many by the depredations of the few. But I cannot find it in my mind [though I can easily find it in my heart] to hope that the future holds the promise of a humane socialism.
Sunday, 16 May 2010
IMPORTANT CORRECTION
Ernie Sosa just wrote to tell me that he never got a call from UMass, and certainly did not [and I think it is fair to say, would not] use such a call to get his salary raised. My humble apologies. I will go back into the text and change it.
SUNDAY MUSINGS
Since today is a day of rest -- no posts either for my Memoir or for Formal Methods in Political Philosophy -- I thought I would take a few moments to talk about what it has been like these past six weeks and more, writing and posting, posting and writing.
In the glory days of Grossinger's, Jewish families would save up and take the train to Liberty, New York where they would eat, dance, swim, play shuffleboard, and escape from the heat, the noise, the congestion, and the tedium of the Lower East Side. Since even a weekend was expensive, parents would pressure their children to take advantage of every opportunity the resort offered. Grossinger's hired tummlers, whose job was to pep things up by making noise when there was a moment of silence or start people doing jumping jacks if they sat down to rest. Out of this world came the expression "I'm dancing as fast as I can," which captures the frenetic pursuit of amusement that dominated the brief vacations. Well, all I can say is that for six weeks, I have been writing as fast as I can. I am now four weeks ahead of myself with the Memoir, so when Susie and I go to Paris in June for a three week stay, I hope to be able to continue posting.
The response to my Memoir, thanks in large part to Brian Leiter, has been extraordinary -- far beyond my expectations or even my hopes. Old friends and former students have written emails with their memories of times past. Folks have checked in from Europe, from Australia, from Canada, and from every part of the United States. Some of you have corrected my faulty memory. Others have supplemented it. The result is a collective oral history, something quite unlike traditional oral histories.
In the past, I have written alone and then sent a book out into the world to find its audience, but now I am posting each installment almost as soon as I write it. I am reminded of a wonderful story about Charles Dickens, many of whose novels were serialized as he wrote them. It is said that he stopped into a London shop one day and overheard two ladies chatting about his latest novel. They were wondering what would happen next, and Dickens realized, with a start, that he had no idea, because he had not yet written it.
There is, of course, a limit to my memoir. Inexorably, I am advancing from the past to the present, at which point I will, perforce, stop. At my present rate, I imagine that will happen some time late this summer. What will I do then? my wife wants to know. I have no idea. Sufficient unto the day, as my father liked to say. For now, I can only thank all of you for the encouragement you have given me and the generosity of your responses. I have not felt so alive in twenty years.
In the glory days of Grossinger's, Jewish families would save up and take the train to Liberty, New York where they would eat, dance, swim, play shuffleboard, and escape from the heat, the noise, the congestion, and the tedium of the Lower East Side. Since even a weekend was expensive, parents would pressure their children to take advantage of every opportunity the resort offered. Grossinger's hired tummlers, whose job was to pep things up by making noise when there was a moment of silence or start people doing jumping jacks if they sat down to rest. Out of this world came the expression "I'm dancing as fast as I can," which captures the frenetic pursuit of amusement that dominated the brief vacations. Well, all I can say is that for six weeks, I have been writing as fast as I can. I am now four weeks ahead of myself with the Memoir, so when Susie and I go to Paris in June for a three week stay, I hope to be able to continue posting.
The response to my Memoir, thanks in large part to Brian Leiter, has been extraordinary -- far beyond my expectations or even my hopes. Old friends and former students have written emails with their memories of times past. Folks have checked in from Europe, from Australia, from Canada, and from every part of the United States. Some of you have corrected my faulty memory. Others have supplemented it. The result is a collective oral history, something quite unlike traditional oral histories.
In the past, I have written alone and then sent a book out into the world to find its audience, but now I am posting each installment almost as soon as I write it. I am reminded of a wonderful story about Charles Dickens, many of whose novels were serialized as he wrote them. It is said that he stopped into a London shop one day and overheard two ladies chatting about his latest novel. They were wondering what would happen next, and Dickens realized, with a start, that he had no idea, because he had not yet written it.
There is, of course, a limit to my memoir. Inexorably, I am advancing from the past to the present, at which point I will, perforce, stop. At my present rate, I imagine that will happen some time late this summer. What will I do then? my wife wants to know. I have no idea. Sufficient unto the day, as my father liked to say. For now, I can only thank all of you for the encouragement you have given me and the generosity of your responses. I have not felt so alive in twenty years.
Saturday, 15 May 2010
QUICK CORRECTION
My son, Tobias Barrington Wolff, points out that I have undercounted the number of bathrooms in the Barrett Place house. It was three and a half, not three. Sigh. The memory flags.
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